Category Archives: Our Modern Pantheon

As writers go, Darryl Madsen had been very fortunate. While still in college, he had been recruited to write stories for one of his professors, whcih led to a moderately well-paying position as a fiction editor at a small press. But that was not enough for Darryl.

“I want more,” he said to his friend and long-time editor Amber Weaver. “I want to touch hearts and minds, you know? Grip them!”

“Of course you do,” said Amber. “But I still don’t think you should be moving to LA. You know why.”

If he moved to LA, he’d be throwing away the perfectly good job he had for the infinitessimal chance of maybe getting some gigs writing movies. “Not TV,” he specified. “I mean, I know it’s a good place to start, but I don’t really want to be writing other people’s stories.”

“You would rather hand your story over to a director who’ll butcher it and take all the credit?”

Darryl Madsen didn’t quite understand how Hollywood works.

But he went anyway, armed with nothing but the three screenplays he’d written, several years of editing experience and a modicum of credits as a performed (if not quite published) playwright.

He was so annoyingly clichéd about it that people were genuinely pissed off when he got a break almost immediately.

“You went to UNC-T?” said Kimberly Han, the young woman interviewing him as a prospective roommate. “I grew up in Trinity’s Field!” Turned out, not only did they have at least ten solid acquaintances in common, but she was on her way to being a bright and successful young up-and-coming film director.

“You’re actually coming here at a pretty good time,” she told him later, “There aren’t a lot of really good writers out there right now.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked. “This is LA, everybody has a screenplay! Even just statistically, there’s gotta be—“

She interrupted him: “Everybody has the same screenplay.”

She showed him ten of them, randomly selected. Different writers with different backgrounds. It took him three to realize what she meant, but she was right. They were all the same movie.

“This is not what I signed up for,” said Kimberly Han. “I wanted to tell stories that were different. People keep saying ‘You need to write what you know,’ well I know this, these, are all crap!”

“So why don’t you write your own?”

“You think I haven’t? No one will read them! Hollywood talks a good game about wanting Fresh New Talent, but when you bring them something inspiring that’s actually original, they buy it and rewrite it into this!”

He read it. “The Truth Is a Fire.” First writer: Kimberly Han.

Second writer: Sidonie Quince. The Butcher.

“Guess which one of us is running a studio right now.”

Turned out, Sidonie still owed Kimberly a favor—and was still taking her calls. “It’s very simple,” she said in her meeting with Darryl. “There are lots of good ways to make a movie, sure. But only one of those ways is the best. We know now that this pattern you’ve noticed in these scripts is the best, most effective way of affecting an audience.”

Darryl had the impression that if he’d pointed out that fewer and fewer people were actually going to see big-screen movies, he would not have gotten a second meeting.

“It is a good pattern,” he had to admit, “It’s just… too much of a good thing, maybe?”

“And the worst part is, they’ve been telling themselves and the public that nothing else works so much that the audience is starting to believe it! You ask someone coming out of the movies if they liked it, first thing out their mouth is whether they understood the protagonist and their motivation!”

“Not every story has a single, clearly defined protagonist,” he said.

That was when she kissed him.

They both kind of freaked out about it afterwards. “Do I like you because I like you,” Kimberly wondered, “or do I like you because I’ve been trained to think of my life as a romantic comedy?”

Darryl hesitated before pointing out: “Couples in romantic comedies are always supposed to fight right after they’ve hooked up.”

“Dammit!”

There was something insidious going on. Something nefarious.

“Hollywood has been brainwashing the American people—“

“Not just America! Movies are one of our most important crops for export.”

“It’s diabolical—but what are we going to do?”

The answer was obvious. A writer. A director with connections. They were going to make a movie.

It was a spectacular success. They spent their last dime making it and then some, but the returns were phenomenal: Sundance, Cannes, five Oscar nominations, one win, and four Golden Globes. Most importantly, though, their profits were more than 2000%.

“No, that’s not the most important,” Kimberly protested on a talk show. “I don’t just want people to pay to see my movie, I want it to have an impact on them. I want them to feel it.”

“Well,” Sidonie Quince replied when Darryl finally returned her call, “they can feel it all right. You know, I underestimated you—her, too, but I think you were the brains of the operation, am I right?” She offered him two million dollars. “I’d like to pick your brain,” she said. “What you’re doing obviously works. I’d like you to do more of it.”

She wanted him to make movies, wanted to pay him to write. To write his way, not hers. But to what end? Just to make more money? He knew what she was trying to do. She wanted to usurp his abilities, appropriate his technique and bend it to her own will. He had started a revolution and she wanted to televise it to sell disposable dish-towels, whatever those are.

No matter what the message of the films he made for her, they would always be twisted, they would always be wrong, it would always be a lullaby, even if covered in blood, to soothe and lull the populus into submission. To make them good consumers.

Was it even possible? The kind of revolution he wanted? Was it possible to uphold his ideals—more than that, was it possible, could it be possible, to create real change? Or would his stories always blend into the background in the end?

Etelka de Marco was bored with Brussels. She had done her last two years of high school there and stayed and gone to Vesalius mainly because of a boy, but all there really was at Vesalius was Politics and International Relations and stuff that pretended not to be Business. She’d had enough of that shit.

“I just want to travel,” she told all her friends.

“Just stay in Brussels,” said Xin Borg, her best friend. “It’s not that different from traveling—you meet all kinds of people—“

“We must have different definitions of ‘all kinds of people’, Xin, because Vesalius is filled with rich brats from all over the world and Brussels at large is full of Belgians—“

The idea was to become an Anthropologist, even if only an amateur anthropologist. She wanted to understand people. No, that wasn’t it, it wasn’t just about understanding, she wanted to discover them. She wanted to expand her own horizons by learning about the scope of human awareness and culture. What were the things a person could believe? It wasn’t just about truth. It was about possibility and it was about context.

It was in Uruguay on a joint project with the US Peace Corps that Etelka met Caleb Robard. She honestly never thought she would fall for an American. She had thought better of herself, but here she was. “Etelka,” he said, slurring the first syllable and swallowing the l in a way she suddenly found adorable. “What kinda name is that?”

“My mother is Hungarian,” she said, “and my father’s Italian.”

“You must get a lot of that back in Europe, huh?”

“You’d be surprised how little, I think. People like us are the exception. Most people still don’t seem to have the wanderlust to leave their hometown even for a day trip.”

“Could be it’s expensive, too,” he pointed out.

It was this awareness that made her genuinely like him, in addition to just wanting to jump his bones.

“I thought you were skipping the U.S.,” said Xin when they Skyped. “Aren’t they, like, imperialist pigs?”

“See, we think that,” Etelka explained, “we assume that, but what if it’s just a different way of thinking? I have to know what drives that. I can’t call myself a searcher for truth if I just write them off as careless xenophobes!”

She was, yes, following a boy to his home country. Letting him guide her, telling herself it was something that she would do anyway.

“Are they everything you hoped they’d be and more?” asked Xin when next they spoke, and every time thereafter, with decreasing enthusiasm.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Etelka. “I don’t know how a whole country can be so oblivious to the outside world. So resentful I mean, it’s like they forget I’m a foreigner and they say something about some other country—one that I’ve been to, for crying out loud—and then they roll their eyes and make fun of me!”

“Well, you are kind of rich,” Xin pointed out.

“Me being rich is not an excuse for them to be assholes.”

“It’s a big place, though,” said Xin, “Maybe you should go to Seattle? Or New York? Not LA. Actually, I hear good things about Asheville—“

“No, it’s okay. I think it’s time.”

“Time?”

“Time for me to come back to Brussels. You know, it’s funny, I left ‘cause I wanted to see the whole world, but I think it left a hole inside. I wouldn’t trade my travels for the world, but I’m starting to think I need to come home to ever be whole again.”

Galena Trinidad had had quite enough of her sister’s nonsense. “If I want to make something, that should be my right, I should be able to do it.”

“But why are you doing it?” asked Astrella Trinidad.

“Because it’s fun!” Galena insisted. “Am I not even supposed to have fun?”

The invention really was quite stupid. It did something that a hundred other things—including human hands—could already do, so it really didn’t add any contribution to human experience.

“But it’s cool!” Galena insisted.

And it was, she supposed. The whirligigs and the doo-dads spinning created a sense that, even if the result was as banal as peeling a hard-boiled egg, Science was happening!

“But I don’t get it!” Astrella confessed. She couldn’t quite articulate what she thought was wrong with it. Later on, though, when she learned about environmental issues and about waste problems, it all started to become clearer to her.

“It’s wasteful,” she finally concluded. Galena had invented something “new”, an automatic tooth-brushing machine that would brush your teeth for you while you were watching TV or reading or taking a bath (“Because it’s also water-proof! See?”)

“Now you’re just inventing things for the sake of inventing them!” Astrella protested. “Who’s going to buy these things?”

That was a question she probably shouldn’t have asked. By the time they were fourteen, Galena already had two patents for every year she’d been alive and five more pending, with seven of them already having caught the attention of multinational corporations.

“You’re kidding me, right?” said Astrella. “You think these so-called inventions are going to help your company? Make operations more efficient?”

“Oh, of course not,” said the multinationals. “We’re going to market them as curiosities. We’re going to mass-produce them, sell at least five million units of each.”

“And who’s actually going to buy them?”

Again, the wrong question. “Everyone will buy them. Everyone will want one. We have ways of making people want things.”

The right question would have been, “Who the hell is going to use them?”

Of the five million units of her automatic bubble-blowing machine for kids’ bubble-blowers, all but seven hundred (which were damaged either in production or transport) were sold. Of the ones that were sold, though, only half were ever used, and only a single thousand (one out of almost 5000, total) were used more than once.

Astrella, meanwhile, devoted her efforts and career towards creating and encouraging new ways to cut down on waste not just by reducing it industrially, but through recycling techniques and experimental uses of algae to digest plastic and even rusted metals back into inert or even bio-degradable substances.

Everyone who knew the sisters agreed that Galena was the happier of the two. (She was certainly the richer.) But history will remember Astrella Trinidad as the woman who saved the world from the terror of encroaching humanity.

I want to tell this story from the perspective of a single character, one who realizes, maybe, the dangers and evils inherent in our current way of life, and changes his ways. But that’s not how this is going to work. That isn’t the nature of this story.

We have always been at war with our mother. Perhaps this is in part, at least, because she refuses to coddle us. The temperatures range from boiling to frozen and every other animal, more or less, would kill us, in one way or another, if we didn’t them first. The Earth is not a safe place. That is not her nature.

But we have built a life here. A society. We have proven ourselves capable of great things. We have tamed or broken every beast we’ve encountered and we have turned almost every natural product into a resource for maintaining our own safety and ultimately comfort.

It is in our nature. We have been suckling at the Earth’s teat, teething on her fingers and wrapping ourselves up in her hair for as long as our species can remember or derive. Anything that was hers, we have taken, not just from her but from each other.

Now there is one of us who owns it all. A single human (actually a small group, but what are numbers?) has amassed almost everything that can be considered wealth and now he is drinking her blood.

He will choke on it.

Some of us are already choking on it. As I sit here writing, there is smoke outside clogging the sky, hiding the sun behidn a veil as though she were modest—or we were. There has been so little rain in this part of the country for so long—a part of the country classified as rainforest, mind you—that there are wildfires along the entire coast, and stretching inland.

“Only you can prevent forest fires!” But I wasn’t even there. Does that make it my fault?

On the other side of the country, they have the opposite trouble. The house that my sister lived in last year ended up under three feet of water. Billions upon billions in property damage, with more still looming. Another hurricane that reads like an earthquake is gathering on the sea, the strongest ever measured, strong enough to level cities if it reaches us. How do we use what nature’s given us to protect us from her wrath?

We have been abusing our power. It is up to us to change it—but what can we do? What can I do? What can one person do to save us from the havoc that mother Nature hath wrought? Is there some savior who can stand in the path of the hurricane? Who can divert the winds and rains to where they are needed? We have no such powers at this time.

It will do us no good to flog the seas for their impetuous tempests. We can scream at the winds all we want to stop stoking the fires, it will still draw them in. But though we are helpless in the face of the cataclysm, yet we are not without blame.

We have been shaping Mother Nature like a sculpture in the rock, but we have delved too deep and she is crashing down on us.

I don’t know who that one man is who ordered this. I don’t even know if he knew what he was ordering. Maybe he unwittingly made a mistake. That would be fine, if he stopped making it. But he keeps making it over and over again. We can blame that man. We should blame that man. He is driven by greed and sheltered by ignorance. But must we not also blame our own complacency?

We, too, have been ignorant. Or perhaps not ignorant. But we have been comfortable in our shells. We have felt safe, we have profited from our safety, even though that safety has come at the highest cost ever measured. We still drive our SUVs. We still use our televisions and computers, powered by fossil fuel plants. We still indulge in plastically manufactured trinkets that we don’t need. If we could only stop, if we could only show that man in his concrete palace that we do not approve, maybe he’d get the message. Maybe he’d stop what he was doing. Or maybe we could divert all our funds, raise someone else up, crown another king of industry—but no. It is too late for that. There is not enough left to go around the old king’s reputation.

What can I do to stop the hurricane? I can’t.

But maybe we can. One man did not cause this. One family did not set this disaster in motion. We did this together and it took centuries of deforestation and fossil fuel burning. We need to fight this together, not with personal sacrifice, not with elimination, not with demonization of the old way of doing things, but with new solutions. Cleaner solutions.

Solutions that he doesn’t want. He doesn’t want them because he cannot control them. He cannot control them because they are too easy for us to construct and manufacture on our own.

Why can’t we do this? Why can’t we work together towards a solution, a rope that will pull us back away from this ledge? Why must we be so selfish that we must blame ourselves and each other, each of us individually, for not choosing to be vegan, for having too many children, for driving to work, for living in the wrong country?

Is it in our Nature?

No. Because we are not Nature. We are Art and we are better than this. Together.

The enemy had invaded. It was the one they had always been taught to fear and hate. “It is because they fear and hate us,” the older generations had always said. “It is because they are powerful and they take what they want and they control our rulers so that we cannot grow as a nation.”

And now, the enemy had finally gotten tired of them fighting back. “They are coming,” was the whisper. It was everywhere, like the buzzing of planes drowning out the birdsong. They were dropping bombs.

“Don’t worry,” says one, “They’re only aiming for military targets.” Maybe they often miss, or maybe they’ve started to realize every one of these people is a threat because every one of these people hates them.

“I just want to be safe,” says the child, and the mother doesn’t know how to answer.

The child grows into a boy and the boy to a young man.

“We need to fight back,” they tell him. “We are a proud nation and we are under attack. The enemy? They don’t share our values.”

“Remember who you are,” the young man’s mother tells him, “Remember what I taught you, how I raised you.” But everything is so different now, here.

“Your mother was not a true patriot,” the other young men tell him, and the older men, the men who are in control, who have been fighting this war the longest, the most effectively. “She never truly knew our ways—she has been corrupted by the enemy. The things she has taught you will not keep us safe. They will not even make you safe.” They beat the corruption out of him.

There are many people in this nation who have been made weak by the enemy’s corruption, or so the young man finds. But isn’t there something wrong?

“We must stamp out the enemy’s corruption!” say his companions, so in the name of fighting the enemy, what do they do? They do worse to themselves.

Finally, the young man finds his way to the enemy. “I just want my family to be safe,” he tells them.

“They will be,” the enemy promises.

The road is long and the road is hard, but step by step, the young man and the people he cares for are brought out of their country and taken to a new one on the far side of the world. They find a home, find a job, try to put the past behind them.

“Papa,” says the young son, “why do the people here behave so differently? Why do they think differently? Why do they have different language?”

“People are just different,” says the father, “in different parts of the world. They don’t think like us.” But there are things the man does not say at that time.

“Daddy,” the son asks when he’s older, “are we bad people?” He has been told at school by the other children that he is the enemy (and even once, it seems, by a teacher).

“Of course not,” says the father, remembering the poeple he left behind, the things that they did, but also the bombs of the enemy. And he reminds himself he has not seen the kind of rampant outrage here that made him abandon his homeland.

Most days are good here. Most days, nothing actually happens. People are nice, respectful. They are different, which reminds him of how different he must seem to them, but most days, they do not attack him. Most days. However, now and then, often enough to keep him desperate, there are looks and there are words. They do not come to blows (yet) but they remind him why these people, where he grew up, were known as the enemy.

“Why do you hate us so much?” he asks a stranger one day. The stranger looks taken aback at first, but once the ice is broken, she says “A lot of terrible things have happened and I guess you just remind us of that. You make us feel unsafe.”

“So you make us feel unsafe, then,” he replies. “Because you feel unsafe? Wouldn’t it be better to help us feel safe again? Wouldn’t that make you feel safer?”

“I guess?” says the stranger, “But we don’t want you to feel unsafe or uncomfortable. We just want you to be, you know…” She wants to say “normal”. She doesn’t, but he can hear it from her heart.

“You want us to be like you,” he says, “because you don’t want to be yourselves corrupted by the enemy.”

Judge Robert Mengen didn’t usually like to go to bars. Public places made him nervous, not just because he was a public figure now, but because he just didn’t really like people. But he was coming up on an election year, so he figured he needed the practice. He started off low key, though. He was just here as a man, not wanting to draw attention to himself. And he would take a cab home.

Which kind of led naturally to the other reason why he was here. He kinda didn’t want to go home. Home was no longer where his heart was, but again, it was an election year and after two extremely controversial court decisions in a row, he couldn’t very well divorce her when he was about to be all over the news again. Folks had enough distractions.

When she walked in, he had already had two drinks, whcih was one more than he’d allowed himself in the last decade. Whether or not that made a difference is anyone’s guess.

She was easily the most beautiful woman in the bar, but hardly the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. There was just something about her, a lot of lady prosecutors he knew, but this girl was no lawyer.

He wasn’t going to cheat on his wife, he promised himself. Besides, it would be illegal. But it wasn’t illegal to look.

Or to offer to buy her a drink.

“Sure,” she said, much to his surprise. (He was surprised to be surprised, too.)

He ordered for her, then she turned to him to scrutinize. “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“I don’t see why,” he gambled.

“Yes I do!” It didn’t seem to be a sudden revelation. “You’re that judge, aren’t you? Mengen. Robert Mengen.”

Was he going to say it? Yes. “Guilty.”

“You’re up for the Supreme Court this year, aren’t you? The state one, North Carolina.”

“You seem refreshingly well-informed.”

“A democratic population should be.”

“So you’re a Democrat?”

She smiled. “Guilty?” she ventured. “But that’s not what I meant.”

“No, I know.”

Now that she had made her basic skill set known, she took him when he didn’t want to go.

“Weren’t you the guy who tried the Alchemyne case? The one out in Trinity’s Field? What was it? Those parklands?”

“Lot 872,” Mengen confirmed. It was how he preferred to think of that entire part of his career.

“Wasn’t that like an important ecosystem? The plantlife, the—“

“I thought so, too,” he interrupted her. “But once I looked into it, once all the facts were laid out, it was very clear there was nothing legally preventing Alchemyne from building their facility there.”

“Didn’t you try that other case, too?”

That other case. She hardly needed to specify.

“Douglass Cobb. Black guy. Serial killer. Allegedly.”

“Well, he was convicted.”

“By you.”

“I didn’t deliver the verdict. I just passed the sentence.”

“The death sentence.”

“He was a convicted killer.” To be perfectly frank, Mengen had always been somewhat surprised he had made it to trial and not been killed at the scene, or in custody.

“Except he was innocent,” the young woman said.

This was, of course, a popular narrative on the theme. The idea of the black boy wrongly convicted of murders committed by a white boy who had faked his own death months earlier had a certain appeal to identity politics as well as to adventure, but the alternative story provided by the defense had been ludicrous.

“There are holes in that theory,” was what Mengen told her.

“And there weren’t holes in the idea that he was guilty?”

“Not by the end of the trial.”

“Why not?”

“Because every facet of the argument provided by the defense fell apart under scrutiny.”

“Like the missing body?”

This made Mengen chuckle. “Which one? The body of Charles Navaro that was never recovered, or the body that supposedly belonged to the real Alexander Navaro?” That really was the most ridiculous part.

“But what about Cobb’s alibi?”

“You mean the fact that even his closest friends confirmed he’d shot whichever Navaro it was?”

“Which Navaro boy it was was the heart of the matter, but I’m talking almost all of which he had an alibi for.”

“Yeah, his girlfriend.”

“So she lied? Under oath?”

“The things we do for love.”

“Then why wasn’t she charged with perjury?”

This caught him off-guard. “That’s… not how it works.”

“No? You’re so sure that you sentenced Douglass Cobb to death, but you didn’t even charge her with perjury? I’m sorry, shouldn’t that make her, like, an accomplice? An accessory after the fact?”

“The laws for that are more complicated.”

“The laws?”

“Yes.”

“But what about justice?”

“That’s what I said.”

“No. You said the Law.”

Robert Mengen did not like where this was going.

“Do you seriously not think that there’s a difference between Justice and the Law?”

“There isn’t,” he said, although what he really meant was, There shouldn’t be.

“Wow,” said the young woman. “That explains something.”

“Look,” said Mengen, “you were the one who brought up democracy. In a democracy, we agree upon what is right and we make that Law.”

“Even if we were a Democracy, though, that still wouldn’t be justice.”

“Well, it would start with examining any law that privileges companies above people.”

Oh, I see, thought Mengen. It was a brilliant switcheroo—if she wasn’t a lawyer yet, she should be. “So this is about Alchemyne.”

“No, Your Honor, this is about you.”

“Are you a reporter?”

“Like I said, I’m a concerned citizen.”

“And my decisions concern you?”

“I’m starting to think your entire value system should concern every member of the human race.

This was the moment when, if the roles had been reversed, Mengen would have hurled his drink in his accuser’s face, ice cubes and all. But men simply don’t do that. So instead, he politely paid for his drink and excused himself.

“Cobb’s execution is tomorrow,” the young woman informed him. “Do you have any kind of celebration planned?”

To be perfectly honest, he hadn’t even been following that judicial aftermath, too concerned with her own political trajectory.

He left without another word.

Her various accusations haunted him, though, all the way from the bar back up to his hotel room. Of course justice and the law were… well, they were related, of course. But had he been wrong about Cobb? Had he been racist? Oh, no, no, not that, surely. Not that. He was certain of Douglass Cobb’s guilt.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt?

They had had a hand in the legislation, of course, but that was democracy, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the part that got talked about in the media, at least not in that context, it wasn’t popular, but it made sense for the companies that produce, that manufacture the things that we need, to have a hand in policy. Think how much they had given to society! How much they knew about their own business, for that matter. These were the people who knew best. By the time he arrived back at his hotel room, he felt a bit better.

He turned on the light, let out a deep sigh, walked into the room and saw a different young woman pointing a gun at his chest. It took him a moment to place her. The girlfriend?

“Well, what can I say, Gord?” his landlord offered instead of apology. “Should’ve worked more when you had the chance. Made more money.”

“How about you should just keep the damn rent what we agreed on!” Gordon countered. “A contract’s a contract!”

“Your lease is up, Gordon; you wanna blame someone, blame the government for jacking the property tax!”

“What’s it gonna take for you to sell me this place?” Now at last, Old Man Richards was sincere.

“Trust me,” said Phil Mulberry, “even if I wanted to sell, you couldn’t afford it.”

But Mulberry didn’t want to sell, of course—on the contrary, he wanted to buy up the whole building, if he could. And for what? Turn it into a parking lot? It wasn’t close enough to downtown for that to make any sense. No, no, for guys like Mulberry it was all about control, all about conquest. He wanted everything, but he knew what his limitations were, so he’d settle for the whole damn building.

“Why couldn’t I get an apartment from McDowell?” Gordon muttered. But it was too late now. McDowell was the other owner of multiple units in the Leverett building, but he kept to himself—hard not to, really, seen as how he lived in Canada or someplace, thousands of miles away, but he still owned property here and from what Gordon could gather (and he could gather an awful lot) McDowell was a heck of a lot better than Mulberry at managing his property, even though Mulberry lived in the same damn building. Gordon wished he could have that. Actually, no. What Gordon really wished was that he could leave here and go buy some cabin out in the woods or something, out where people weren’t so nosy, out where neighbors didn’t try to strike up a conversation just ‘cause they felt like they knew you after nine years living in the same building. He just wanted his privacy.

“That’s none of your business!” Gordon insisted, though to be perfectly honest, he didn’t have a better answer. He just liked his space.

But Mulberry was right—not about doing what he was doing, but about the solution to it, given that it was done. If Gordon was going to continue to live in the Leverett Building (unless he wanted to move to unit 32, which was obviously haunted, so no) he was going to need a roommate. A roommate, god dammit! He hadn’t had a roommate in damn near forty years, unless you counted his ex-wife, and you shouldn’t, even though you might as well. And since he didn’t really know anybody seen as how he didn’t like people, that meant inviting a stranger into his home. That provided some opportunities, of course. There were certain types of peopel Mulberry really didn’t like… Unfortunately, these were the same types of people Gordon was none too fond of, and besides, Mulberry would get final say anyway, so what the hell?

Once the applications started coming in, it was pretty easy to weed out most of the undesirables, mostly the folks with really odd-sounding names like “Kawabanta” and “Laminetsky” and goddamn “Ng”—what the hell kinda name was that? What was harder to spot was the black people—excuse me, “African Americans” (like any of them ever been to Africa)—but he got those at the interviews. Which only left two things to worry about: queers and muslims. He wasn’t quite sure which one would be worse, but he was goddamned if he’d have either one of ‘em in his house. Or apartment.

Finally, though, he didn find one guy looked like he could be trusted. “What kinda name is ‘Laird’?” he asked the guy. “That Scottish?”

“I think so,” said the man, name of Raymond. “Never really gave it much thought.”

“All right, fine,” said Gordon. “If you want it, this is what it looks like, your room’s over there, make yourself at home. Deal? “They’d already hashed out the details by then, so they shook on it.

At first, it was great. Raymond Laird didn’t really have much stuff, so the living room didn’t really change too much except for one painting he really seemed to want over the TV, which was fine, it was this pretty standard landscape with some ducks and a little girl in a dress, utterly inoffensive.

As for what went into Raymond Laird’s room, that was none of Gordon’s business. He kept his own private things to himself, too. That was a part of the bargain neither had even had to bring up while talking.

Yet once the other man had stowed away all his secret boxes, Gordon found himself growing curious. Oh, shut up, you old fool, he kept telling himself. You wouldn’t want him snooping around in your room, either, would you? And what would he think if he caught you? You with your hands on his pretty things?

But how do I know that what he has there isn’t…

What? What was it that he was afraid of?

Well, there were a lot of things to be afraid of, weren’t there? This Laird guy was living in his house now. Gordon’s name was on the lease. Anything this lodger did, Gordon could be held responsible for. He pictured the aftermath of the inevitable postal killing spree—not that Laird was a postal worker, he was an accountant, but that was almost worse. Who knew the sorts of depraved thoughts those degenerates kept hidden under their numbers.

It wasn’t that Gordon objected to guns—his own, for protection of his private property, was stored under the coffee table in case of emergency, and Laird knew that. So if Laird had a gun, too, Gordon expected him to disclose that. But he hadn’t. Which made Gordon suspicious.

There could be other things, too, though. He imagined the police raid and all the things they might find. Drugs, for Christ sakes, kiddie porn! Can you imagine! The Headlines: “Old Man Richards Arrested with New Roommate on Suspicion of Involvement!” “I didn’t know!” curmudgeon insists, but we know better, don’t we, folks?” I always knew that crazy old man was up to something!” says landlord Philip Mulberry, decorated upstanding citizen and whatnot.

No. No, it was too risky. This was his house, dammit, he had a right to know what was going on. This Raymond guy bursting in here like he owned the place—who did he think he was? Who was he? Expecting charity and whatnot—well, Gordon Richards did not believe in charity! Charity was for schmucks who trusted people. And trust was for idiot children.

So he waited until Laird was gone for the day and snuck into his room. Serves him right, he tried telling himself, for not having a lock on his door.

It’s not like he was stealing anything. He just wanted a look around. In particular, he wanted a look in those boxes…

No…

They were dresses. Dresses and skirts. And blouses, and—ugh!

Girls’ clothes!

This was so much worse than Gordon had expected. He almost wished there had been kiddie-porn, or instructions on building bombs, at least then he could’ve called the cops and started over with a new roommate. One who wasn’t some damn freak of nature. But no, nowadays you had to be “tolerant” and “understanding” of grown men playing dress-up even down to their goddamn underwear. It made him sick to his stomach even thinking about it.

After he put everything away back where he found it, he went back and sat in the living-room. He thought about Raymond Laird wearing women’s clothes. He told himself he didn’t want to think about it, but every time he did he got a thrill like you wouldn’t believe. It made him angry, but the anger made him happy; it felt justified.

Then when Raymond got home, he couldn’t even look at him. He didn’t want to. He had a secret, now: that he knew Raymond’s secret, and Raymond didn’t know. And he didn’t want him to.

Raymond acted like he knew there was something wrong, or off, or different, but he didn’t say anything.

Having a secret turned out not to be all it was cracked up to be, though. So the next day, as Raymond was starting to head off to work, Old Man Richards found himself hollering at him from his chair “You gonna go out dressed like that?”

Raymond stopped, confused, turned around, looked himself up and down, trying to see what was wrong with his outfit, making sure his shoes and socks both matched. Finally, he gave a helpless shrug in Gordon’s direction.

Gordon just stared at him, and finally Raymond understood.

He was running late to work, though, so he didn’t say anything. But as he turned and walked out, Gordon could tell there was a look of shame and fear on his face.

Well, fine, he thought to himself, let him do some stewing for a change! These freaks and perverts, it’s about time! If he feels enough shame, hell, maybe he’ll, I don’t know, stop doing it? Christ sakes.

Sure enough, Raymond didn’t even come home until pretty late. When he did, it looked like he’d been drinking. Couldn’t handle it, could you? thought Gordon. Just couldn’t handle somebody knowing the truth about you.

Raymond sat on the edge of his seat, leaned forward, legs spread just a bit, and ran his hand across his open mouth, almost like he was making his leaps, you know?

“You went in my room,” he stated.

Gordon said nothing.

“You went in my room without my permission.” He flexed the fingers of his right hand and his joints popped. “That’s not what we agreed to.”

“What you gonna do about it?” Gordon sneered, then added another word, a word he shouldn’t have said, a word that gave the game away and made things unnecessarily uncomfortable in their living situation.

But after a short, tense moment of silence in the wake of that word, Raymond snorted and started to laugh, only a little bit at first, a few rocks before the avalanche, like he was uncovering several different layers of irony over the course of laughing.

“Well, what’s so funny!” a frustrated Gordon finally demanded.

So when Raymond had calmed himself down enough, he finally replied: “You just don’t get it, do you? Oh, it’s not what you think. It’s not the obvious thing.” Then he paused and continued, “But once I tell you what it really is, you’re gonna think it’s so much worse!” And he burst into giggles again.

This was doing nothing to help Raymond’s case in Gordon’s eyes.

“Oh, let me have my fun,” he finally said. “Probably the last time I’ll get to laugh like that for a while. “And then, more thoughtful, “It’s been a while since I’ve laughed like that.” Finally, he composed himself. “I’m not a transvestite.” He was calm by now. “Well, at least… Those women’s clothes. I don’t wear them in secret or anything. I’m assuming that’s what you meant when you used that word. Although I guess technically… But I’m not… exactly… a gay man, Gordon. Because I’m not… exactly… a man. Yet.”

Gordon had no idea what Raymond was talking about.

“That is to say, I am a man,” Raymond continued. “I always have been. In my own way, I guess. It just never occurred to me that I could be, I mean, I kept hearing about it, but me?” He chuckled, then stopped. “I was born… a woman, or… with women’s… I was assigned female at birth. I just never felt comfortable in my skin, you know?”

Gordon still looked at her blankly.

“No, I guess you really wouldn’t know, would you?” she sighed. “I’m still attracted to men,” she continued. “For a while, I thought maybe that was why I… So I guess that word you used earlier does technically apply to me, or to what I want to be—I’m still new at this, see? I’m still… I’m trying it out. Trying to what I want to be—I’m still new at this, see? I’m still… I’m trying it out. Trying to see if it… fits me better, and I gotta say, I’m liking the results. So far. For the most part.” After another moment of silence, “Those clothes in there are mine, or were mine—I don’t know why I kept them, I just didn’t think—I didn’t know… They’re just in case, I guess. Listen to me, I’m fifty-three years old and I’m still experimenting. Going through ‘phases’—“ But he caught himself. “No. No, this isn’t a phase. But they’re still… I don’t know. It’s a safety thing, I guess.”

Finally, Gordon managed to clear his throat. “So are you…” he began, then adjusted, “that is, do you… He wiggled a bit in his seat. “What are you? Now, I mean?”

“I’m a person,” Raymond said coldly.

“But what… what parts do you have?”

Raymond drew himself (herself?) up in the seat and said confidently: “I don’t have to answer that question. It’s private.”

That just seemed patenlty ridiculous to Gordon. They’d been talking about this for ten minutes already, he (she?) just hadn’t made… Oh, hell, hadn’t made it clear in all the rambling monologue.

But that was it. Raymond said no more, just got up and went back to h—to Raymond’s room, leaving Gordon alone to stew.

He’d actually make a pretty nice-looking woman, he found himself thinking. Prettier than my ex-wife, anyway… And he snickered.

But at night, he found it drove him crazy. He tossed and turned as he’d never tossed and turned before. He just couldn’t stand not knowing such a basic fact when Raymond knew so much about him.